


Splinters

by sciencebutch



Category: Marvel, The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Bruce Banner-centric, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 07:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18279014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencebutch/pseuds/sciencebutch
Summary: There are limits as to what human consciousness can withstand.Ragdoll is what happens when those limits are reached and surpassed





	Splinters

**Author's Note:**

> some people??? turn into what essentially amounts to a live-sized crash dummy??? to cope????????????
> 
>  
> 
> (ragdoll is an alter oc created by me & ao3 user [nightoftheghouls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightoftheghouls/pseuds/nightoftheghouls))

There are limits as to what human consciousness can take in regards to pain, trauma, hopelessness, fear. There is a ceiling that you hit after you’ve had enough, biological barriers occur, things like fainting or shivering or dying.

 

Bruce thought his limit would never be reached. He thought it couldn’t.

 

(Or maybe it had. Maybe it was reached when Momma died decades ago. Bruce feels like he shattered that day, shattered like Momma’s skull, broke like a mirror into hundreds of shiny knives, sparkling as the scarlet did on the tarmac under the streetlights. 

 

Perhaps Bruce’s splintering was his limit being reached and surpassed a hundred times over. And now no one could meet it)

 

Ross was good at pushing limits though. He excelled. And he pushed and pushed and  _ pushed  _ until there was nowhere else for Bruce to go. 

 

And so Bruce splintered again. Another piece of him broke off. He can’t remember it really, he’s not sure if he  _ wants  _ to. He just knows there was agony. Agony and screaming then breaking.

 

The transformation was accompanied by a wave of dull gray rather than gamma-green. Numbness rather than anger. Their name is Ragdoll, he finds out later while he’s in the Crossroads; the thousands of writhing paths in his mind lighting and dimming like neurons. Figments of his imagination made larger than life. It’s the place where he talks to the Hulk. It’s the place where his splinters un-splinter and he can speak to the rest of him; his alters, he supposes they’re called. 

 

Bruce almost doesn’t notice them at first, laying stiff and still at the side of one of the paths. They’re blurry, like their outlines are made nebulous by fog. A way to hide and not be seen.

 

Ragdoll looks like what would happen if you glued skin to a skeleton. Cadaverous and gaunt -  though their stomach is bloated from malnourishment and starvation. Their eyes are too big for their face and filled with static; empty of emotion. They don’t blink, just stare up into nothingness in a harrowing display of pain. They don’t move, save for the few weak and pitiful breaths that heave their figure; the air whistling past their mouth.

 

They don’t do  _ anything _ . 

 

Their lips are stitched closed with tendons so they can’t scream. 

 

Screaming had only made the pain worse, and they exist solely to dull the pain.  

Bruce had gazed upon the figure lying contorted on the ground, his eyes wide in shocked horror, mouth agape. He startled when someone lay a mammoth green hand on his shoulder. 

 

“Their name is Ragdoll,” Professor said. The name felt like a fist around Bruce’s beating heart. What is a ragdoll, but some unfeeling thing meant to be tossed around and used?

 

“Are they...are they me?” Bruce’s chokes out with difficulty. His throat is tight.

 

“We’re all you, Bruce,” he responds, voice calm and sad and sage. 

 

Bruce stares and can’t look away. 

 

Sometimes he remembers Ragdoll’s memories like he remembers Hulk’s or Joe’s; in brief flashes and snippets that visit him in dreams. Short smatterings of vignettes that are followed by some strong emotion or another. Usually anger. 

 

Ragdoll’s are accompanied by nothing. No feelings except pain that doesn’t matter because there aren’t any feelings with the pain. Bruce sees gruesome things done to the atrophied body that’s him lying bound to the metal surgery table and feels nothing but apathy.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr!


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